Friday Street

Agas Map

List documents mentioning Friday Street

List variant names and spellings

Friday Street passed south through
Bread Street Ward, beginning at
the cross in Cheapside and ending at
Old Fish Street. It was one of
many streets that ran into Cheapside
market whose name is believed to originate from the goods that were sold
there.

Stow writes of the street’s name: Fryday
streete so called of fishmongers dwelling there, and serving
Frydayes market (Stow 1:351). Modern
scholars agree, stating that Friday
Streetwas probably the market where medieval fishmongers sold their
wares on Fridays, when meat was forbidden to Catholic England (Bebbington 137). Ben Weinreb and
Christopher Hibbert, however, suggest that the name may also be a corruption
of the old English name Frigdaeges,
and the street may have originally have been dedicated to a man so called
(Weinreb and Hibbert 302).

Friday Street did not have many sites
of historical importance aside from the three churches that stood there. The
churches of Friday Street were St.
Margaret Moses, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Matthew. Stow catalogues
the graves of two aldermen, four sheriffs, five Lord Mayors, and one John Mabbe, once the Chamberlain of
London, within these three churches (Stow
1:322, 1:351). The number of powerful men buried here suggests the
power wielded by the wealthy merchants operating in London’s great market.

All three of Friday Street’s churches
have been destroyed, and today only a small portion of the original street
exists. Since the Victorian era, Friday
Street has become a small lane that runs from Queen Victoria
Street to Cannon Street (Weinreb and Hibbert
303).